Saturday 2nd February 2013
With more fresh snow having fallen and a near perfect weather forecast, Hazel & I headed up to Glenshee for some ski touring. When we arrived there we found the weather not quite as expected – gale force winds blasting spindrift across the car park (to the extent we had to park facing into the wind in order to open doors without them being ripped off!) It was only supposed to be about 30mph on the summits, this came as a bit of a surprise. We were very glad we’d put our skins on at home the night before!
We headed out east from the southern carpark and traversed around the hill and up towards the bottom of the Meall Odhar tow. Apart from the wind, the conditions were perfect – fantastic snow and clear sunny skies, which spurred us on. When we got to the Caenlochan Poma we found it the lift track freshly groomed but the lift closed due to the high winds, so we skinned directly up the lift track to the top of Meall Odhar. Unsurprisingly the winds were getting worse as we got higher, and the shoulder linking across to Glas Maol was stripped of snow, so we decided not to continue further. With the winds coming from the north, Coire Fionn wasn’t appealing either, so we instead opted to ski back down the west side of Meall Odhar, which was covered in lovely pillows of fresh untouched powder. Back at the bottom of the Caenlochan Poma, we then skied south into the valley overlooking the A93 (again heading away from the wind). Pushed along by the wind, we traversed across some boilerplate ice (Hazel getting to test out her sharp new edges) and then laid down some fresh tracks in perfect consolidated snow right down the valley floor, before skinning back out the other side to the car park. After a quick lunch we grabbed some afternoon lift passes and made the most of the great on-piste conditions that extended from Butcharts right across to Glas Maol.
Several other DMC folks were also out enjoying the pistes including Andrew & Berenice, Suzy, Dan, Andrew K and Jim. Despite us all being spread around the ski area we all somehow managed to sniff out the hot chocolate in Jim’s camper van at the end of the day, all of us squeezing inside for a refreshing brew – thanks Jim 🙂
